You slid the nit comb through my hair
then rinsed and laughed about how
you loved hunting them down
Tag: family
ESSAY | Initiation – Kate Stukenborg
I wanted to be a part of their club, their conversations, their laughter. Eating, I decided, was my way in.
FICTION | Rooms: A Love Letter – Annemarie McCarthy
Inside the atoms of the cavity block extension live the remnants of a thousand John Players.
DIGITAL ART – IJWBAA
Family is my way of honouring the Filipino spirit, where the bond of unity, the guidance of elders, and the hope carried by the younger generation come together to form a love that is simple, yet profound—one that transcends individuality and connects us all.
TWO POEMS – Simon French
For the good of the country we claimed their land & property. It was necessary for the people.
Love in the Age of Instant Mashed Potatoes – Anne-Laure White
The first potatoes I loved were the dehydrated shreds sold in cereal box-style cartons at Key Foods. My mother gave them some delicacy, stirring in milk, butter, salt. On holidays her mashed potatoes were perfect, and doted on accordingly. They were adjusted hourly for flavour and texture, refrigerated overnight, and reheated slowly on the day….
Garden of Weeds – K.P. Taylor
My mother loved her garden: the Lily of the Nile, the roses, the lemon tree, the hydrangea at her bedroom window. Hydrangeas flower blue or pink depending on your soil – hers were always blue. The weeds, however, she did not love. “A weed is just a flower growing in the wrong place,” she would…
The Season of Dying Birds — Harriet Sandilands
In the courtyard, at the entrance to the bookshop, an egg smashed on the cobbled ground – albumen, yolk and the bald outline and bulging eye of an almost-bird.
Radio Music Magic – Paul Sasges
Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher, radio Turn it up, that’s enough, so you know it’s got soul. ‘Caravan’, Van Morrison, 1970 The transistor radio came out between the vacuum tube in the fifties and the Walkman in the seventies. I spent many hours on our braided area rug prone upon my…
My Mother’s Quilt – Clare Reddaway
This is my mother’s quilt, but many other women have had a hand in it. It was started by my mother in the 1950s, and she made it for most of my life, in admittedly rather a desultory fashion. I remember her sitting on a freezing, pebbly beach in Suffolk, with the grey North Sea…
Roses in the Attic: Ruminations on Moving Back Home – Abby Connolly
It had almost been a year. This night, a year ago, was when I had had to come back. The realisation was a rock in my gut that nauseously listed every now and then to the side, keeping me awake. It was the sensation of motion in the deprivation-tank stillness of night that displaced me…
The Other Half-Orphan – Thomas Stewart
I was not the first. I knew that when it happened. But you feel like the only one it’s happening to. Because it’s happening to you, and there’s only one you. My father died when I was 23. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in July and died in February the next year. For the…
Porridge 